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September 04, 2010

This year I studied basic Accounts and revisited Pure Maths. For the next round, I think I'll take Economics and Sociology.

Sociology because my husband is into it (there's a lot of sociology mixed into the postgraduate study he is doing), and economics because I very much enjoyed reading Cory Doctorow's For The Win a few months ago.

FTW is a book about gold farmers in online games, and there's a lot of economics running through the book, with the narrator occasionally pausing to explain the salient points. What can I say, it sounds geeky!

Then of course there's also Wikiversity, that veritable hotbed of educational resources.

That's where I found out last night that economics is a 'social science'.

Eh? I thought it was mostly maths!

So this means I will actually be taking two social sciences if I take economics and sociology together. Until now most of my training has been in physics (a 'natural' science) which has taught me a lot about how the world works, so it's only natural that now I should learn more about how people work.

One very good thing is that Maths, that wonderfully powerful tool, is vital in the economist's toolbox just as it is essential in the engineer's. So here's hoping it will give me an advantage as I head into the unknown realm of social science.